Does anyone know of any environmentally friendly cloud services as an alternative?
Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
11–20 of 177 posts
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#12This looks like a change in policy for personal student accounts. If this person is doing something related to research, their own group should provide a solution for data management and backups. I really don't see the problem here, other than using "the environment" as a bullshit excuse for cost savings.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#13Microsoft is following Google decision two years ago to stop their more generous (than MS) storage plan for educational institutions.
A lot of the people who had MS offering instead of google were saying that they are safe with their choice. 1TB is much more reasonable than "unlimited" and Microsoft would keep it. Now here we are.
Happy to be part of CERN so I don't have to worry about my institution storage situation at all. And it is not like one drive or google drive would be suitable for me anyway.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#14Apple cut the phone charger for environmental reasons too. It always has to be the end user who sacrifices for the environment.
Honestly I don't feel the sacrifice. My house is flooded with old chargers. They're in a bin like old legos.
The e-waste related to including chargers in the box is a real thing. That change also allowed them to halve the size of the boxes, effectively doubling the shipping yield. On a billion-device level that's a non-trivial change.
And yes, it's good for their bottom line. And yes, it effectively increased the price by $30. Sucks for me, yes. So what?
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#15Does anyone know of any environmentally friendly cloud services as an alternative?
Yeah. I keep a backup disk at a friend’s house.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#16It sounds like it's McGill asking "And this is why we [McGill] are asking you to reduce the data stored in your OneDrive and in your Outlook email." https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri... But, amazingly, Microsoft did argue this nonsense: 1. security risk of storing files 2. environmental impact 3. ability for Microsoft to innovate more by deleting your stuff https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/e…
Yeah, literally scrambled and verified but I still have 25Terabytes of data (this is the limit since forever) with no notice of reduction. I'm not saying that this isn't true, but I'm saying that McGill admins can set data limits.
Edit: our IT admins are really baffled too and will now verify with Microsoft if this is an actual thing or just poor phrasing from McGill.
Update: there'll be a change apparently but not this draconian. Storage will be limited to a minimum of 100GB/user with an additional 100TB "pooled" storage for everyone. While this is a shock to me and my admin, McGill's policy is still exceptionally draconian.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#17While it seems to be a business oriented move by MS, I can vividly imagine how such institutions wastefully neglect practically free storage...
Having to store data for five years seems to me to be a lame excuse.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#18Apple cut the phone charger for environmental reasons too. It always has to be the end user who sacrifices for the environment.
They cut chargers so they wouldn’t have to change them for the EU. The environment, as usual, is for greenwashing the move.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#19Apple cut the phone charger for environmental reasons too. It always has to be the end user who sacrifices for the environment.
Honestly I don't feel the sacrifice. My house is flooded with old chargers. They're in a bin like old legos. The e-waste related to including chargers in the box is a real thing. That change also allowed them to halve the size of the boxes, effectively doubling the shipping yield. On a billion-device level that's a non-trivial change. And yes, it's good for their bottom line. And yes, it effectively increased the pri…
If that was the genuine intent, they would have deducted the price to buy one from the device, but that never happens, so allow me to be skeptical of the reason.
Re: Microsoft limits institutional cloud storage space for environmental reasons
#20Interesting, I personally use my institutional OneDrive sparingly, but I would love to see my professors and IT staff scramble to switch from 1TB of cloud storage to 20GB. I have always opposed selling everything to MS and nobody has ever cared to offer alternatives (only Moodle and it's badly configured lol)
Microsoft did get me with their back-up your documents feature to OneDrive. It’s preposterous.
Something will come of it, particularly because of how much buy-in there is/was from academic institutions who jumped ship from Google Docs+Drive to Microsoft cloud offerings.